


Siren Song

by Arazsya



Category: Down - Definitely Human (Podcast)
Genre: Alcoholism, Episode: e14 Hypothesis, Manipulation, Missing Scene, Other, Shapeshifting, non-human anatomy, references to verbally abusive parent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:41:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27906889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arazsya/pseuds/Arazsya
Summary: It’s on the Virgil with the monster, or it’s being crushed into a pringle by the water pressure in the deepest known oceanic trench on the planet.
Relationships: Sam Jansen/The Entity
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3
Collections: Consent Issues Exchange 2020





	Siren Song

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Flammenkobold](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flammenkobold/gifts).



The creature doesn’t _look_ like a monster. Sam watches him through the small window in the door, leaning so close that he keeps having to wipe the fog of his breath off the glass, waiting for him to betray himself; he doesn’t know what he’s expecting – tentacles, maybe, or a goatee, or a good evil laugh, loud enough to reverberate unmistakeable through every room in the sub. Something. Anything.

He doesn’t. He just sits on the edge of the stretcher Stephen Frame had died on, wearing his face.

That should be enough. He’d lied to them, told them he was Stephen. Argued it, when they challenged him. Sam can’t trust him. No chance. None of them can.

But he’s not _acting_ like a monster. Not now. And he’s not _actually_ tried to hurt any of them – god knows that if he did, it would be easy enough. They’ve not got anywhere to run; it’s on the Virgil with the monster, or it’s being crushed into a pringle by the water pressure in the deepest known oceanic trench on the planet. Maybe he really had just misjudged what they’d find comforting. It’s not _that_ outlandish an idea, considering that they’re probably the first human contact he’s ever had. 

Maybe Sam’s just trying to make excuses because he has to go in there.

Stephen – _not_ Stephen – knows he’s here. He _must_ know, he’s the one who’d called him down, so there’s no way he’s not expecting him, but he’s not paying any attention to the door. Not to anything, really, just regarding his surroundings with placid, time-passing consideration. Occasionally, one of his legs will give a languid, fractional swing, as if it’s drifting in water.

It feels like it’s for Sam’s benefit. So the creature can point to himself and say _look how normal I am. Look what a good job I’m doing at being Stephen. Of course you can trust me_.

He’s holding the bottle. Not how Sam had imagined it, on his way to sickbay, smugly hoisted and proffered towards the door with the occasional shake for emphasis, like a lure – he’d had a brief, hysterical flash of the idea of an anglerfish, except it’s some poor bastard three sheets to the wind, leaning on a shopping trolley and waving a half pint of vodka through the air like it’s lighting their way, and had nearly choked on something that might have been a laugh or a sob or both. Just held in a loose grip against the creature’s thigh, as it waits for him.

Only a few metres away. He just has to open the door, go in, and get it.

Sam’s hand stutters at the lock, and he clenches his jaw, pulls his fingers back into a fist. Only a little further, and then he can put it all behind him. Find a little peace, inside the cool steadiness of the glass. A ward, for everything beyond the Virgil’s titanium shell, and everything inside, too. Perhaps he won’t even need to drink it.

The creature looks up as he steps inside. Smiles, warm and utterly benign, in that way that Stephen had been so good at, like bedside manner but actually genuine. It’s been too long since Sam’s seen anything like it, the rest of them all strained and snarling, and his eyes sting as he forces another pace from his legs.

“Sam,” he says. “Glad you could make it.”

“Shut up.” It’s an octave higher than it should be, cut through by a flinch as the door closes behind him. “Just – just give me that.”

“Do you want me to throw it?” The creature’s face, benevolently bemused. “You do know your hands are shaking?”

It’ll shatter, like the one in the command module. Sam inhales, tries to steady himself with the breath, but it’s like he’s feeling every ounce of the pressure of the water that surrounds them. All he can do not to crumple in on himself, and no small wonder that he’s trembling under the strain. There aren’t that many bottles left on the ship.

“Put it on the floor!” He points, wildly, to a vague point between them, arm wavering to the point where it’s just one of several indicated. “There – a-and then back off.”

The creature raises an eyebrow, but nods. He pushes himself down off the edge of the stretcher, and Sam starts back into the door, fumbling towards the controls. His hand hovers over them, so tense that he knows he’ll be able to feel his muscles ache with it afterwards, but the creature does as he’d asked, placing the gin down with a faint clink of glass. Then he steps away, with another gentle smile at Sam. 

Sam waits, staring at him, but he doesn’t move. Just meets Sam’s eyes with a steady, soft, dead man’s gaze. His skin crawls when he tries to hold it, but he’s half-convinced that if he looks away, jaws will snap out towards him, fish-flash quick, and he’ll be swallowed.

He takes a shuddering step forwards, and nothing changes. The walk seems to take an eternity of halting and distance-measuring, but it stays that way – there’s no clattering in the corridor beyond as the others come to save him from his own stupidity, no sudden trap-spring from the creature in front of him, no great impact as something strikes the Virgil from out there in the dark. He crouches, his touch finds the smooth, dependable surface of the bottle, and he sags in response, shoulders slumping.

“You don’t really need that, you know,” the creature says, and it’s so close to what he’d imagined Stephen saying, if he found out, that for a moment Sam forgets to separate them in his head.

“That’s not really your business,” Sam says, bringing it in towards his chest and marvelling at the ridges of the screw cap beneath his fingers. He just has to get out, now. Then he’ll be done with it, with _all_ of it.

“I just want to help you,” the creature tells him, another of those promises that seems to come so easily to him. “You know, you really shouldn’t have all this regret about helping yourself. Do you think your father regrets any of it?”

“How do you know about that?” The question’s dull on Sam’s lips – it’s not important, after all. Just one more nightmare in a place made of them. Only difference is it’s one he’s lived before.

“He was the problem,” the creature goes on, with a faint shake of his head. “Not you. If you keep on blaming yourself, you’re excusing him. You don’t have to punish yourself for something you didn’t do.”

“How do you know about _any_ of that?” Sam takes an awkward, stumbling pace backwards as he tries to wrench himself upright enough to look at him. Works his jaw around more explanations, struggling to extract themselves, insisting that his mother had needed him, that he could have helped her.

“But even if you _had_ done anything wrong.” The creature shifts, leaning against the stretcher as if trying to affect nonchalance. It wouldn’t have looked right with Stephen, and it doesn’t look right now, and for some reason that just makes it worse, that he’s fumbling through it like any person would. “None of it matters anymore. Not down here. You’ve finally run away far enough – you can’t get any further.”

“Th-there _is_ a bottom,” Sam finds himself insisting, fixating on that one part of it. “There has to be – we’ll find it, and then the Virgil will go up again–”

“Do you really want that?” The creature tries to meet his eyes again, and Sam starts at the screw cap, leaving first be damned. “You’re so far away from everything, down here. You don’t have to remember, and you don’t have to drink.”

Sam stares at the bottle, blinks, and is abruptly sure that if he did open it, tried to drink it, he would find it nothing more than salt-thick water, waiting its chance to sting at the core of him.

“You’ve been trying so hard, for so long,” the creature says, voice swaying through Sam’s swimming head. “Don’t you want to be at peace? It can all be done now.”

“No.” Sam tries to bite his lip, drag enough resolve from the action to get himself out, but his limbs stay heavy. “No, it’s all–”

The creature gives a light touch at his wrist, fingers a little too cold ghosting across his skin, and he flinches. Finds himself relaxing into it, then, staring at the point of contact and wondering absently why it doesn’t hurt.

“You’re safe, down here,” the creature murmurs, half-reverent, like it’s something he’s been meaning to say through epochs. Sam forgets not to believe him. “With me. Safe from him, and yourself, and everything you left up there. All you have to do is…”

 _Give up_.

Sam reckons the thought sounds like him, but the intonation of it is wrong. No pause or emphasis, no fluency, as if it’s just sounds stitched together from a foreign language without understanding. His voice, and not.

Then, so briefly he might have imagined it, Stephen’s lips on his, and not.

He should pull away. The creature isn’t stopping him – the hand on his wrist is still feather-light, not even close to a grip, and there’s nothing else to hold him in place – but he doesn’t. Just exhales, faint and surprised, and he’ll try to believe later, when he has the mind for it, that it’s just the utter bewilderment that means he does nothing.

“… accept it.”

It hadn’t _been_ anything. Stephen – _not Stephen_ – had barely touched him. For less than an instant. Nothing at all, and it doesn’t have to be.

Except, he’s still there. So close that Sam might have been able to feel his heartbeat, if he’d had one. Waiting.

“The others–” Sam manages. His head aches, thrumming in an impossible rhythm of _give up give up give up give up_ , and the fingers at his wrist time it to his own faltering pulse like a metronome.

“They all have their own problems – has Marion told you about her brother?” There’s the slightest of smug twitches at Stephen’s lips, and Sam wants to recoil, but he’s so near, and the weight of his touch is heavier than the bottle in Sam’s hand, grounding him like he hasn’t been in so long. “I could.” 

“I don’t want you to–” Sam cuts himself off, biting at his lip, as if he can chew the ghost of the creature’s kiss from it. “The cameras.” Always recording, Marcus had said, so advantage will be able to go through all the data when they get back. What would Laura Mentorn think of this? She’d probably send him off to get picked apart.

“What exactly are you afraid they’ll see, Sam?”

The question lingers, just like Stephen’s voice on the radio had, implication and suffering and threat that no ventilation system will ever be able to filter from the air.

He considers shoving himself back upright. Walking out again, like he’d planned to, keeping his face to the monster in Stephen’s body, resealing the door behind him, and then crawling back to the engines and practicing his best steady voice for when Charlie Dresden calls him up to demand more useless updates on their situation.

That’s what he’ll do, he decides, and then he doesn’t pull away when the creature kisses him again. It’s firmer, this time, scarcely on the gentler side of bruising, and the delicate mirage that’s all that’s left of Sam’s will folds to it, his throat aching. The creature knows the second it happens – Sam can feel it, a shift in his bearing as he deepens the kiss, tongue pressing over his lips. The hand on his wrist tightens, as the other carefully slides the gin from his fingers, setting it back down on the floor with another chiming tone of glass.

Sam closes his eyes in a doomed effort to process what’s happening, what’s happened already, but he can’t scrape enough of his mind together, through the insistent refrain in the background of his thoughts and the way the creature is tasting him, languid and unhurried, utterly certain in a way that Sam hadn’t thought he’d see again since the Virgil scraped its way through what they’d thought was the seabed.

The creature moves him, pulling him up and stepping into him. His legs won’t support him, trying to waver their way out from beneath him, but he doesn’t fall, held up where Stephen’s body presses against his. There’s a tracing along the inside of his arm as fingertips still cold from the bottle start to wander their way up, and it’s been so long since he’s been touched like that, with that exact kind of gentle intimacy, that he shivers, a soft moan rising in his throat. He goes where he’s guided, turns his head when the creature’s lips begin to follow the line of his throat down. Submits.

Forgetting why he’d stopped looking, he opens his eyes again, and freezes, what warmth had been starting to gather in his skin dissipating, as hard and fast as if the Antarctic water has smashed its way into the sub to drown him.

The creature isn’t wearing Stephen anymore. Instead, it’s someone else, a face that doesn’t belong here. A person Sam had chosen to let know him, half his heart, a world away and safe and he doesn’t want to see him _here_. Doesn’t even want to think his name, even just the shape of it in his head cracking his marrow into frost.

“No,” he says, bleary and thick with want even as he tries to fold it down and away. “No, this isn’t right, I don’t want this.” He’s not about to _cheat_ , and the revulsion at what seems far too mundane a concept for this place makes him want to laugh again, helps him steady his voice, wrench his wrist from the creature’s hold. “ _No_.”

There’s a flicker of something in his face, at the word – Stephen’s face again, at least. Then another, in his body language – it’s brief, not an actual change, no shimmering transformation of features that he could pinpoint, but Sam recognises it, all the same. Would have anywhere. He’s replayed scenes with it in his head so many times that it’s become indelible in his memory. A moment on the cusp, that he’d lived so often since he was a child, wondering if this was it, if he’d finally broken whatever dam it was that held back his father’s fists. If the violence was finally going to turn physical.

It’s a threat, and a pointed echo of one, and Sam flinches back into silence, jaw clicking closed. The whispering in his head swells louder, until he can’t make the words out anymore, just the unrelenting force of their meaning, and it’s easier to just do what it says.

His lower back hits the stretcher, and the creature pushes him back onto it, leaning down over him in a parody of how Marion had tried to help Stephen. He goes, breath cold and catching in his throat, and it begins to toy with the buttons of his shirt as if it’s unfamiliar with the concept. Playing, again, because it would have stolen the muscle memory from their heads like it had stolen Stephen.

Sam forces himself to open his mouth again, to try to tell it, insist, but no sound comes out, and every time he tries to make it, he recognises again his father in Stephen’s stance. When he meets his eyes, trying to plead, they’re still his lover’s, the set of them all wrong in the dead man’s face, and he turns his face away, towards the place in the ceiling where the red light of the camera blinks like a dubious promise.

The others aren’t seeing this. If they had, they would have already come. They wouldn’t just sit there and watch, even if they thought he was willing – god knows that Captain Birdseye wouldn’t miss the opportunity to tell him he’s been an idiot. And if the creature’s right and they never do get back to the surface, he’s got plenty of time to try to work out how to erase the footage before it gets back to advantage.

“Come on, Sam,” the creature admonishes him, voice so soft that Sam almost doesn’t notice that that isn’t Stephen’s, either.

Stephen had had a lover, too. A husband, he thinks Marion had said. Friends. A memory, that this thing wears and perverts in doing so. Maybe it’s better if it’s not wholly him, but Sam thinks, with a prickle of shame at the selfishness, that it could choose someone else – _anyone_ else – to have pieces of.

Sam closes his eyes again. There’s nothing he can do about the form the creature has chosen, except not to look at it. Doesn’t even notice that the motion has sent his welling tears in tracks down his face until the creature kisses them away, shushing him between breaths it isn’t really taking.

There’s a skimming touch across his forehead – it feels like it’s the edge of a palm or a finger, but both the creature’s hands are already accounted for – one propped against the stretcher beside his ribs, the other idly following the pattern of veins that lace deep through his stomach. It turns wrong, too, crooking beyond the way that joints should be able to as it sooths through his hair.

He squeezes his eyes closed a little more tightly, and tries not to analyse whether what’s pushing past his lips now feels anything at all like a tongue. There’s a play of light across his lids, a soft-edged spiral of the spectrum that shifts like it’s pulled by water, and he wonders if the creature is being the thing that had killed Stephen, now.

He’d like that better, he thinks, than dead friends or distant lovers. 

It had been so beautiful, drifting out beyond the Virgil’s windows. A ghost or an angel or a fish but whatever it had been it was _radiant_ , and the memory of it sends a cascade of tingling down his spine from his skull. He sighs, almost content. Maybe that’s what Stephen had talked about, the sound that had made him do what it had wanted. It would make sense – it’s not as if Sam’s fighting, but it’s pleasant, a faint harmony through his bones that he almost welcomes as it helps the last of his resistance seep away.

The creature undresses him, as much as it needs to, and he can feel the pressure of it as it settles over him, too many limbs still curling over his skin like it’s one of those things that experiences the world solely through touch. They slide around his lower back when his hips twitch, pushing up under his shirt, and more of those dazzling patterns dance across his eyelids as they move. Perhaps he’s enveloped completely in that glimmering light, humming in the same chord that he thinks could probably get him off by itself.

“You’ll feel so much better,” it promises, and Sam spreads his legs to let it start to stretch him open. What pushes into him feels like a cock, or at least, enough like one, thick and warm and hard, and that’s the only assessment he’s willing to give it. He arches and strains to take it, is rewarded with another inch that almost has him shouting into whatever is in his mouth.

He gives up. Unmoored, he lets himself want, not caring about whether that’s him or something that’s been planted in him. There’s just sensation, heat and aching need, and the understanding that the creature is right. This is better.

It makes no audible sound, but Sam can feel that tone in his head still, soft and resonant, drowning out his own noises as it thrusts into him. He’s not sure if the creature comes, how that would even feel, but he knows that he does, until even the impersonal touch of the stretcher burns against his skin. The memories, when he reaches for them, are bright, incandescent, and he wants to crawl back into them and never come out. But the creature isn’t inside him anymore, its absence something cold in the pit of his stomach.

When he opens his eyes, it’s moved away from him. Just by a few scant centimetres, but enough that he’d be able to get up and leave. It has Stephen’s face again – _just_ Stephen’s, but with that smug edge behind the features that means he can’t mistake the two of them anymore.

It says nothing, as he starts to scrabble his clothes back into place with hands that don’t seem to be shaking anymore, no matter how sure he is that they should be. He shouldn’t be getting up, should be curling up inside like a dying spider, scarcely twitching, but instead there’s just this heavy, solid thing in his chest, intractable as the ocean beyond, that he thinks he might be able to recognise as peace.

The thing that’s not Stephen doesn’t _need_ to speak. He knows exactly how Sam feels, for better or for worse.

Sam turns his back on the monster and staggers from the room, hardly able to keep his balance. Doesn’t notice until the door has locked behind him again that the bottle is still sitting where it had been left, in the middle of the floor, a lure already taken. He won’t go back for it. Not now.

He doesn’t think he needs to. Hates that, briefly, fiercely. And then he gives that up, too.


End file.
